Denis Guenoun

Jews?” the child queries, probing to see how that word feels in the mouth, and here the father gives several answers. Judaism is a religion, and we are not at all religious. Hitler and the collaborationists, however, did not ask any Jew whether he or she was religious before they were destroyed. One cannot deny being a Jew without insulting the dead. So yes, to that question, the father instructs the child, you must answer “yes”—but this is an ethical demand, and not precisely a description of what is. In the end, the father offers “Semites,” which, he explains, means both Arab and Jew or, rather, names their commonality, proximity, intertwining. We are like Arabs, we lived close together on the western shore of Algeria. “That is what the word Semite says, either Jew or Arab without distinction, what Jews and Arabs share, what they are together.”

The son’s relation to the father pivots on the parsing of these categories. The son asks why “Semite” has to include the Jews at all, and the father explains that it is because of the French that both sides of the term, Arab and Jewish, must be held together. In 1870, the French government declared the indigenous Jews of Algeria to be citizens of France, but not the Arabs. A division and inequality were introduced that had to be politically opposed. One way to do that is to insist that “Semite” refers to an unbreakable bond, a name for resistance itself. It matters what language was used between father and son, but also between Jew and Arab.

smile. Others march with them, fists raised, men and women who don’t see the photographer. It is summertime, maybe the morning of Bastille Day. In another shot they are posing in a group on the beach: pale bathing suits, ten or so of them, mainly girls, but my father is there too. They are facing the camera laughing, in disarray like an anarchic sports team, you can sense the laughter, the jostling. In the background, other swimmers. Several girls in the group laugh and raise their fists at the camera—damp, on the beach, just emerging from the water. When we think back on this period we see darkness and tragedy looming over it. Burgeoning fascisms, revolutions betrayed, trials, tortures. For them, I am absolutely sure, it was a time of joy.
(I had to choose: to